Ellsworth American
In Winter Harbor and New Mexico, Developers’ Plans Stir Controversy
By Tom Walsh
May 1, 2008

WINTER HARBOR — More than 2,600 miles separate the rugged granite coastline of Winter Harbor and the high desert desolation of the New Mexico town of Datil.

Nonetheless, the two geographically remote spots have one thing in common: Residents of both communities have more questions than answers about developments being proposed by investors headed by Bruno Modena, a millionaire from Milan, Italy.

On Wednesday, May 14, a 7 p.m. public meeting will be held in the Winter Harbor gymnasium to discuss the Modena group’s proposal to develop an “eco-resort community” on its 3,200 acres of heavily wooded property adjacent to Schoodic Point.

Three days later in New Mexico, hundreds of people are expected to gather in Datil for a public meeting to discuss the Modena group’s highly controversial “water mining” proposal in Catron County.

Residents of the ranching area southwest of Albuquerque claim the scarcity of water there makes water more valuable than oil.

More than 400 formal protests have now been filed against an application by Modena’s Augustin Plains Ranch LLC to drill 37 wells, each 2,000 feet deep, to pump up to 17 billion gallons of water a year from an underground aquifer. The water would be moved some 70 miles to the Rio Grande River by pipeline and be sold to help New Mexico meet its obligation under the 1938 Rio Grande Compact to provide a certain amount of water to the state of Texas.

A standing-room-only crowd of more than 300 people packed the Datil Elementary School last December when the first such hearing on the project was held on Dec. 4, 2007. A similar turnout is expected for the May 17 meeting due to local concern over how the shallow wells of area farmers would be affected by the Modena project.

Back on the Schoodic Peninsula, Modena’s representatives have been meeting privately over the past six weeks in small groups with representatives of the towns of Winter Harbor and Gouldsboro, the National Park Service, nonprofit organizations and others.

At 3,200 acres, the development would affect an area one-third larger than the Schoodic Section of Acadia National Park.

While development proponents have yet to discuss their “conservation community” concept in a public meeting, the site plan for the project shows a 250-room hotel located immediately east of the Frazer Point entrance to the Schoodic Section of Acadia National Park. The plan also shows a second, 150-room hotel sited just north of the Route 186 intersection with the Schoodic Point access road. It would front a proposed 18-hole golf course surrounded by wetlands.

The site plan also depicts areas that would be devoted to studying native flora, fauna and sealife. The plan also calls for a mix of housing and construction of a network of carriage roads similar to those in place on Mount Desert Island within Acadia National Park.

When the developers’ representatives surface at the May 14 public meeting there will be no shortage of questions confronting them. A list of 18 specific questions was the work product of an April 17 public meeting in Winter Harbor sponsored by the Schoodic Committee of Friends of Acadia. About 75 people attended that event. The developers’ representatives did not.

Since that meeting, Marla Stellpflug O’Byrne, the president of Friends of Acadia, has publicly expressed her skepticism about the project.

“No matter how ecologically sound the construction, a development of this scale would forever change the character of the communities, the region and the quiet experience of visiting Acadia at Schoodic,” she writes in the most recent edition of the Friends of Acadia Journal.

“A beaver ecology center, a captive bird breeding center and a nursery of jack pine stands may be fine objectives in landscapes that have already lost their natural habitats,” O’Byrne writes. “But it is a tragic irony to build an ‘eco-resort’ touting sound ecological practices while destroying the rare natural communities.”

Last Friday, proponents of the project were in Winter Harbor, visiting face-to-face with town officials and local business owners.

Carl Johnson, a chef who owns a Winter Harbor restaurant and a gourmet seafood smokehouse, said he told the two men who stopped by his smokehouse that the concept was ill-conceived given the short duration of the tourist season in Downeast Maine.

“While it would be great to create some jobs in this community, I told them that, from a business plan perspective, this whole thing makes no sense,” Johnson said.